Reliable Identities Using Off-the-Shelf Hardware Security in MANETs

Application scenarios for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) impose a variety of non-standard security requirements. Furthermore, in many scenarios owner and user of devices do not always have physical control over the device. Therefore,security in MANETs should be rooted in hardware security anchors. For current PC architectures a relatively cheap hardware anchor is readily available, the so-called trusted platform module TPM as standardized by the Trusted computing Group. This paper shows that TPMs can provide the basis for rather complex security mechanisms that can support a variety of security properties in MANETs. In addition to straightforward requirements like authenticity or confidential storage of data on the device, also more complicated requirements like unlinkability of multiple identities or restrictions to the validity of identity certificates are discussed.